To publish BS or not, that’s the question

Richard Tol levied a strong accusation at Judith Curry for highlighting two seriously flawed papers (via twitter):

Its wrong, but with @JudithCurry lending her authority it becomes disinformation

Judith defended herself in a post where she tries to shift the blame to the mainstream scientists:

 Here is a quiz for you.  How many of these disinformation tactics [a list containing a mix of logical fallacies and avoidance tactics] are used by:

• JC (moi)
• Public spokespersons for the IPCC
• Joe Romm
• Marc Morano

If that’s not a dog-whistle I don’t know what is. 

Keith has a nice rundown of the discussion, and the ensuing thread over there contains many good comments. He’s got a knack for hosting interesting discussions.

Richard has since laid out his argument as to what’s wrong with the papers in a guest post over at CE.  Basically they’re methodologically flawed:

Using “detrended” fluctuation analysis to study “trends” was a dead giveaway that something is not quite right with these papers.

Tol goes on to write: 

7. There is a substantial body of climate research that is credible — even if it reaches opposite conclusions — but there are also papers (left, right, and center) that are just flawed.
8. If flawed papers reach a certain prominence, they should be debunked. Prominent but flawed research does damage as it misinforms people about climate change. Publicly criticizing such research hardens the existing polarization.
9. If flawed papers linger in obscurity, they should be ignored. The papers are wrong but do no damage. Lifting a flawed paper out of obscurity only to debunk it, is no good to anybody.

Curry takes especially issue with the last statement:

Yours isn’t a statement about science, but about playing politics with science, and reinforces the gatekeeping mentality in climate science that was embarassingly revealed by the CRU emails. (…)

Of course scientists don’t want the public to be misinformed about the science! So If I’m concerned about public understanding of science, I’m automatically “playing politics with science”? Then I sure hope every scientist is.

Judith rightly says that “Of course there are flawed papers that get published.” But why shining the spotlight on them? What’s gained by doing so?

It’s true that these discussions don’t occur about science without policy relevance. Research on the mating behavior of fruit flies won’t result in argument whether a flawed paper should be promoted in the public sphere or not.

The differences are that 1) such research is not present in the public sphere, because the public isn’t interested, and 2) even though flawed papers exist in any field, the more its conclusions clash with ideologies, the more attempts will be made to reach opposite conclusions and thus the more deeply flawed/biased papers will be published. It’s not a coincidence that there’s no fruitflies-version of EIKE or Heartland. 

Curry:

Most people don’t come to climate etc. to reinforce their prejudices (there are far too many echo chambers where this is much more satisfyingly accomplished). They come here to learn something by considering the various arguments.

The general tone of comments at CE makes me strongly doubt this last statement.

Tol:

@Anteros
I would agree with you [no harm done by highlighting flawed studies] if climate blogs were exclusively read by well-intentioned, well-informed, and intelligent people.

Richard further shows his mastery in the tweet-universe with one-liners such as

I argue for self-censorship. It is what separates adults from children.

Over at CaS, Roger Pielke Jr makes the point that wrong or bad articles can be a useful teaching tool. And indeed they can. But as Stoat rightly says,

within a managed class structure with someone guiding the discussion, it is fine to discuss flawed texts, for the reason given: it encourages critical thinking. That wasn’t what Curry was doing.

Tol:

Curry took two papers that almost nobody had read, and put them in the limelight.
The papers say 2+2=5.
There are a lot of people who would like to believe that. It is not true.
So now there is yet another dogfight about whether the answer is 3, 4, or 5. We can do without that.
There are plenty of real issues to argue over.

Jonathan Gilligan, consistently thoughtful, writes:

Pielke has said that he views blogs as more like the kind of discussions people conduct over beers at the neighborhood bar, and from that perspective Richard’s criticism makes no more sense than telling the crowd at the pub to leave sports commentary to the experts. 

Tol makes some valid points here, but Pielke is more persuasive. People will read these blogs or not as they choose, and when a blog repeatedly calls attention to crap, its credibility and its audience will adjust to reflect this. Climate Etc. is not The Wall Street Journal, so the greater danger in Curry’s gushing over crap is to Curry’s reputation, not to the public understanding of science.

I have also compared blogs to bar-discussions (quoting Bob Grumbine), but that comparison is about the presence (or lack) of quality control. As Tol rightly says, 

With academics blogging and tweeting, and journalists, and prime ministers, and institutes, departments, agencies and companies, I don’t think there is a one-rule-fits-all.

At CE, thousands of people are listening. Judith’s opinion and her writings make their way to the general public and politicians via mainstream media and Senate hearings as well. By the scale of those who are engaged in the conversation, that is orders of magnitude different from a discussion in a bar. That also means that the risk is twofold: Both to Curry’s reputation (her problem) and to the public understanding of science (everyone’s problem, even though Curry tries to belittle that).

Whereas Tol argued based on methodological flaws, Fred Moolten explains why the papers’ conclusions are unsupportable on physical grounds and I made a similar argument:

Conservation of energy precludes the climate to wonder off too far in any direction without being “forced” to by changing boundary conditions. Unless of course the energy is merely being redistributed within the system. Which it isn’t, since all other compartments of the climate system are gaining energy.

The paper’s conclusion that the observed warming is “predominantly a natural 100-year fluctuation” is at odds with conservation of energy.

All very reminiscent of the random walk saga and the Harry Potter theory of climate.

Advertisement

Reflections on climate discussions in the blogosphere between Keith, Lucia and me, part 2: The role of blogs

Keith Kloor has posted part 2 of the conversation we had with the three of us (i.e. him, Lucia and me). The topic of discussion here is the role of blogs in fostering reasoned discussion (or rather staunch debate, see e.g. Bob Grumbine’s discussion of the difference). This one is much shorter than part 1.

Basically, I think blogs are conducive to a more polarized debate, partly because the anonymity of the internet.

A related point (not discussed with Lucia and Keith) is how the blogosphere differs from the science-sphere. Grumbine had some very good insights into that, retold here. On the internet, anyone can say anything; there’s no quality control, no gatekeeping. Depending on your viewpoint, that may be a good or a bad thing, compared to science. I tend to think though that your best bet to learn science is from scientists.

Reflections on climate discussions in the blogosphere between Keith, Lucia and me: The spectrum of opinions, uncertainty, risk and inertia

Keith Kloor has a post up that is an almost literal transcription of a conversation we had between him, myself and Lucia.

It’s a good initiative I find, to attempt to ‘bridge the climate divide’, as his post is titled. It’s an important theme for me as well. I’ve tried to find common ground with others before, e.g. Tom Fuller and Roger Pielke Jr.  Not that I see such a huge divide between Lucia and myself at all, but that’s also what makes such a conversation both possible, useful and enjoyable. A conversation between more extreme or more excitable voices on either side may quickly become an exercise in mudslinging; there has to be some common ground in order to have a conversation.

The crux of what I had to say is this (quoting myself):

So you have a large amount of inertia in the energy system, in the carbon cycle and in the climate system, which means if you start taking actions, it’s decades into the future until they start taking effect.

If you combine that inertia in those different systems, with uncertainty of the precise effect, and with some knowledge that it could go pretty wrong with a business as usual scenario, then you have to take proactive steps, and that’s where the urgency comes from.

In my view, it’s similar to a chainsmoker who gets told by a physician, “hey, you should really be careful, you should stop smoking if you care about your heath.” And the person says, “hey I can still bike to the town and I feel fine and my grandmother lived until she was 96 and died in a car accident.”

You can postpone dealing with smoking until you’re in the intensive care unit. But that’s a little late. That’s the line of argument in which I see the urgency of climate global warming.

I plan to go into these issues in more detail at some point.

Thanks Keith and Lucia!

Lucia’s report is here. She makes the interesting observation that

It seemed that Bart and I may disagree less when on Skype than when posting comments at Roger Pielke Jr.’s blog. That’s an interesting thing in and off itself.

Though perhaps we have slightly different recollections of our (few) discussions at Roger’s. We never were very antagonistic as far I recall, though on the impersonal internet it’s always easier (tempting even?) to be more antagonistic than one is in “real” life (insofar as Skype is real and not internet; ah well, you get the point).